As internet video communication moves rapidly into the commercial realm, it is expected that video applications will become popular in mobile networks. Though the mobile networks are improving with higher bandwidth and lower transmission delay, they remain limited due to a high demand of video communication. Therefore, optimizing the network resource allocation and adapting the application data rate in the network becomes a priority for the network operator. There are several existing approaches to adapt the application data rate in a network, one being the so-called “transcoding”, one being the “packet dropping”, and another one being an approach called “layer dropping”.
An approach which is based on transcoding is e.g. disclosed in US-Patent Application 2008/0205389 A1. It discloses a policy engine which manages processing constraints of the media processing units to determine the best combination of transcoding processes in order to provide the highest quality transmissions without overloading the processing capacity of the host computer.
An approach which is based on packet dropping is e.g. disclosed in US-Patent Application 2008/0259799 A1, and an approach which is based on layer dropping is e.g. disclosed in US-Patent Application 2008/0122878 A1.
It has, however, so far not been tried to develop an integrated rate shaping mechanism which takes into account more than one different rate shaping scheme in order to improve video quality.